Tiny Little Fractures
by wildskysong
Summary: "You're broken."  She says, and she  almost timidly  touches his face, and as the dream collapses to dust he smiles.  "And I think I'm supposed to fix you." Slight A/A, A/E and A/C.  Part 6/10.
1. i: falling

**Disclaimer: I do not own Inception. It belongs to the genius Christopher Nolan, whom I much admire and envy.**

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Gravity: The undeniable pull of one object to another.

_i. falling_

Ariadne knows that she is dreaming. The bishop clutched in her hands tells her so; it is weightless, impossibly light. She tries to relax, to force herself to breathe and gain control of the dream, like Arthur taught her.

But her heartbeat is muchtoofast in her ears and her blood surges in her veins and fear spikes, her breath coming hard and fast.

She's terrified but at the same time exhilarated, and she knows why. She's sitting on a window looking into a shattered hotel room, at tossed tables and broken glass, and there's a sense of freedom and release rushing in her chest that's almost like a drug.

Tonight is the night she and her husband break out of the dream and into reality.

(_Husband? Says Ariadne to herself. No, I'm not married.)_

She swings her legs idly and she doesn't have her bishop anymore but that doesn't bother her, because there's no need for it—she knows she is dreaming because this reality is not real. (It's a half-truth—something once known but forgotten, locked away in the recesses of her—Mal's? Ariadne's?—mind. )

Across the gap between the two buildings, she sees the door swing open and her husband steps in, his happy face sliding onto the glass-strewn floor and the flowers toppling from his hands.

"Mal?" Confusion, accompanied by the _crunch _of glass underfoot and the sound of panic.

Dominic Cobb comes into view, immaculate in his crisp suit, ready for his anniversary with his other half.

"Mal!" Definite panic now.

_(I'm not Mal! Ariadne shouts, but she's trapped, silenced, and _fuck, _where's the bishop?)_

Ariadne sits and listens, horrified, as Mal and Dom talk—Mal tells him of her plans and what she's done and his face is so shocked, so sad. He understands, finally, that she's ready to jump and he's going down with her. He staggers onto the ledge and he's so scared of her falling that he's close to falling himself.

"You are waiting for a train." She says, and Aridane knows that she's not Ariadne now, she's Mal, or Mal is her, and Mal is talking to her husband, preparing to shatter him like the glass on the floor.

"Mal, no. Think of the children!" Dom's eyes (his beautiful eyes, she's always loved them) pleading, scared.

"You do not know where the train will take you, but it does not matter." That's strange—her fear is evaporating, dissolving, leaving only fierce joy and wild exhilaration. "Why doesn't it matter?"

Something in Dom crumples like paper and his face falls and she can see his heart break in his eyes. "Mal!" It's the wounded cry of animal, of prey that's been hunted and hurt and knows that its death is coming and that there's nothing it can do to postpone that death, to get away—

_(No no no don't jump don't jump can't you see you're killing him! Ariadne screams but Mal doesn't, or can't hear her because her blood is singing in excitement.)_

"Come with me." She says and Dom is shaking his head, tiny little fractures cracking open his heart, his chest, and she can almost see him bleeding, dying.

"_Mal." _And it's begging, it's pleading, it's _fucknoIloveyousomuchdon'tdothistome. _

And Ariadne can feel her face (Mal's face, Mal's, because she could never ever do this to her friend-teacher-maybe-something-more, never ever) lift in a grin. "It does not matter." She coos. "Because you are going together."

Dom reaches out, one last act of love desperation pleading, but it's too late, it's far too late, because Mal-Ariadne is on her feet, is coiled, is tense, is shoving off and then she's falling—

Mal laughs, once, freedom at last, she's going _home_, and Ariadne hears Cobb's anguished cry and sees him reel back, sag against the window frame because his legs can no longer support him, because his heart is torn out and fractured and smashed into the pavement at terminal velocity.

Ariadne and Mal hit the pavement and Cobb is weeping—!

And she woke gasping, jerking upright, her heart and lungs and blood thundering and her eyes leaking. She fumbled, ripped the IV from her arm. She dug almost frantically in her pocket and then felt the warm familiar weight of her golden bishop—a hasty test sent it toppling to the left, and she breathed again.

It had been a dream.

She swiped her arm across her face and wiped away the terror and tears, and by then Arthur noticed that she was awake and he was at her side in seconds.

"Are you okay?" There was a note of concern (emotion! From Arthur!) in the Point Man's voice and his usually smooth face was crinkled slightly. He took in her red eyes and blotchy cheeks and wounded glare and he _knew_, like he knew when Cobb had staggered in, two years ago, his eyes wild and his heart in pieces at his feet.

"Mal?"

The look on her face was enough, and his eyes softened into sympathy. "We've all been dreaming about her." He confided, patting her back. "Since the mission. She's dead, Ariadne. She's a projection. She can't hurt you."

And suddenly it was too much and the bishop was so tightly clenched in her hand that it left marks. "But she can hurt _him._" She gestured wildly, her control (which she learned from Arthur) gone, towards the pale, prone man lying on the chaise, an IV in his arm and an air of decay hanging about him.

Dom Cobb had been sleeping for two weeks, trapped in limbo, unable or unwilling to wake. And Ariadne blamed herself, because she had left him there, had left in the vastness of limbo with nothing to guide him out but the half-remembered images of his children's faces.

It was her fault that he probably would never see them again.

After the plane landed, they took him away, got him out before the bops descended, though Saito had woken and cleared Cobb with Customs. They fled to a warehouse, and there they stayed, lost and sad and confused.

And they dreamed, too. They hooked themselves up to the PASIV and tried to dream away their troubles.

When they weren't dreaming, Arthur, Eames, and Yusuf all spent their days in or around the warehouse, leaderless, unwilling to leave Cobb but itching to get away, almost unable to bear the sight of the once-strong man broken.

(But Cobb had been broken long before the Fischer job. He had been broken the second his wife kicked off her shoe and followed it to the earth. Ariadne knew this. She had seen him topple, like her bishop, unable to resist the pull of is gravity, of his wife plummeting towards the earth.)

"Cobb—" Arthur blinked and his mask slammed into place, the mention or thought of his best friend too much to bear . (When it was too much, he shut off his emotion. How Ariadne envied him. She'd kill to shut of her emotions, to shut down her heart, to silence the cries ringing in her ears.) "He's strong. He'll pull through."

"You don't know that."

Arthur looked at her in the sad sort of way he had—the resigned way, the moving-on way. "No." He conceded. "But he came out last time."

"He had Mal last time!" Ariadne was all anger and despair and guilt and Arthur was resignation, was defeat and sorrow. "Do you know what it is to be a lover? To be a half of a whole?"

Arthur blinked, drawing back ever so slightly, his comforting hand withdrawn. "No. Do you?"

The Parisian stopper mid-rant, confusion flooding her anger, watering it down. Then she felt sick to her stomach, every part of her rebelling against what she had just said.

_(You're just a child!) _

The conversation with Mal—God, had it only been a few weeks?—rang in her ears and Ariadne was almost floored by the memory of it and of Cobb crumpling, screaming as his other half fell to their deaths.

"Ariadne, Mal isn't real. She's dead and she's just a projection." Arthur tried to reason with her, once again far softer than she ever remembered him being (except on the plane, watching Cobb with her, his knuckles white against the leather seats).

"You don't understand." Ariadne groaned, cradling her stomach and her bishop, refusing to look at the sleeping dead man sprawled in the lawn chair. She herself barely understood. She was too young, she'd never _loved_ like that, like the other was her sun, was her reason for drawing air, and yet she had _felt_ it, had felt that wholeness, that completeness that only came with another person. And Arthur didn't know, couldn't know. He was only a few years older than her, and he just couldn't—

"Don't understand what? That you feel guilty? That you're scared of Mal?" Arthur's brow furrowed and she knew he was upset, hurt, angry, bitter, missing Cobb and Mal and the glory days. "She's terrifying, and we've all dreamed about her, when we've dreamed at all. It's normal to see her—it's a nightmare."

"I didn't see Mal, Arthur." Ariadne looked up and met the Point Man's eyes. She licked her lips. "I _was _her."

And behind them, on the chaise, the unconscious Dominic Cobb twitched.

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**If you have any questions, review! **

**~WSS**


	2. ii: beginning

**Part 2/10! I want to thank everyone who reviewed this story! Your support means so much to me, and I hope that it continues to be an enjoyable read for you all!**

**Disclaimer- Inception belongs to Chris Nolan. **

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Beginning: The start of anything, inevitably followed by the end.

_ii. beginning_

She's dreaming again. It's to be expected, of course; she's hooked up to the PASIV for the sole purpose of dreaming, and this time she's herself, cradling her bishop in one hand, a gun (Cobb's favorite, a Beretta, ironically enough) clenched in the other.

This time the dreamscape is a country field, not a city. There is waving grass instead of shattered glass and peace instead of frantic fear and pain and freedom. The sky is brilliant, bluer than it could ever be in reality, cloudless and clear. It's far calmer than the first dream, far more relaxed, and Ariadne's tension starts to evaporate as she wanders the field.

She can hear birds and crickets, singing their songs, gentle music to accompany the glorious day. But there's no human life, no voices, no screams or shouts or yelling.

_(No Mal, Ariadne thinks to herself. No Cobb.) _

She relaxes, tucks the Beretta away, and enjoys the scenery. She doesn't know why she's dreaming about fields and blue skies but for two weeks her dreams have been nightmares (have been Mal, have been soaring buildings and plummeting drops and Cobb crying _nonono_) so she doesn't mind the swaying grass and she doesn't try and change her surroundings, doesn't try and fold the dream in on itself or put bridges in the sky (a particular weakness of hers; the bridges are absolutely useless, but they're beautiful, and that's enough). She just enjoys, feels the warm summer breeze and smells the faint smell of the ocean, salt and sand and far-off wind.

It smells like the French countryside, she thinks, somewhere along the Mediterranean, perhaps.

For what feels like hours she walks through the grasses, calm, relaxed. Her bishop is returned to her pocket. She doesn't need it, because there are no threats. For the first time since Fischer, since the inception (since forever, really, because it's been that long, it seems like, since Cobb sauntered into her life and taught her how to dream), she's calm and quiet and at peace.

And, predictably, it's Mal who ruins said peace.

Ariadne doesn't see her, hear her, anything, until it's far too late.

By the time she sees that swirl of dark hair, that flash of malice on a pretty face, she's down and her face hurts like hell and she's just been roundhouse kicked in the mouth (she didn't know Mal could do that. What normal woman knows how to do that? But, seeing as she's dealing with Mallorie fucking Cobb, Ariadne really shouldn't be all that surprised.)

The ground is harder that it looks, and she's dazed from the kick to her mouth, and she screws her eyes up to peer (half-angrily, half-fearfully, though she will never admit it) up at the older (and dead) woman.

"Stay out." Mal hisses, and she's all wild fire, dark ferocity, vicious in her fury. "These are not your memories to share!" And suddenly there's a long knife in her clenched hand—

(_That can't be good, Ariadne observes, detatched.)_

—and it's plunging towards her—

There's the crack of a gun and the groan of impact, the splash of blood and the thud of a body, and Ariadne's holding her smoking Beretta, her hands shaking, and Mal's body vanishes slowly, sinking into the softening earth.

The projection is dead and gone but now there are _voices_.

For the briefest of moments, she thinks she's finally gone completely bat-shit crazy because she's hearing _voices _in the middle of a random _field_ and she's just _shot_ a dead woman who was trying to _kill _her and really, who's to say that everything, the inception, all of it, hasn't been just a crazy dream of a crazy girl?

But the bishop in her pocket is proof of reality, of relative sanity, because she remembers making it, carving it, holding it in her hands until she had its weight memorized.

_(I might be going crazy, though. The dream business seems to do that._) And it's true too. Arthur, Eames, Yusuf, all were at least a little insane, if only because they followed Cobb, and that man was the textbook definition of poor mental health (though again, Mallorie fucking Cobb had something to do with it).

Despite the bishop's sanity-affirming powers, Ariadne is still hearing voices, and they are coming closer, and the grass was waving, parting, and—

Mal and Dom stumble through the grasses, leaning on one another, laughing, trading jokes, speaking an odd mixture of English and French, words flowing between them as easily as water, as breathing.

Ariadne freezes, because this will be rather difficult to explain, seeing as she's on the ground with a split lip and a smoking gun and blood dripped onto the ground around her.

But Cobb and Mal don't stop, don't shoot confused glances, don't even acknowledge her presence.

In fact, Cobb actually steps through her, his body travelling through hers rather unpleasantly, and then he and his wife (or girlfriend, maybe, because they're both so _young_, her age, and almost ridiculous in their adoration for each other) continue through the grass.

For a heartbeat she's left alone, and then, almost against her will she's on her feet, lurching after the pair, crashing through the stalks of grass jerkily as some unseen, unknown force forces her on, after Cobb, following their laughter, her hairs prickling, hands spasming around the Beretta.

Staggering after them, Ariadne has time to blink, to get her heart rate back down to something reasonable, and then she's standing at the edges of the field, looking at a set of train tracks that parts the sea of grass.

Cobb and Mal stand closer to the tracks, giggling to themselves, and the whole dream is so bright and happy that Ariadne realizes this must be a happy memory—

(her mind supplies Cobb's dream-elevator, and the "floor" that contained a rushing train)

—and her gun is still trained on Mal and she finds that she cannot pull it away. She can hear them, their voices magnified, slipping through the tranquil air of the dream, mellow, happy.

And then Cobb is down on one knee, something glittering in his hands, and she hears his smooth voice ask the Question, and Mal's hands fly to her lips.

She laughs, and it's a clear sound, a bright sound, and Ariadne is stunned at how happy Mallorie Cobb looks. (There's no anger, no lonliness, no trace of rage or pain or betrayal on her face.)

"Yes, Dom." Mal laughs, and it's a sound that can bring birds out of their nests, that can calm screaming children, make a soldier put down his gun, and for a second Ariadne understands how Cobb could love Mal so much.

Out of the corner of her eyes, she sees a flash of anger and pain and betrayal, and the projection bares her teeth.

_(This is not your memory to meddle with!) _

And there's a dull roar, the scream of rushing wind, and then the train, Cobb's train, old and magnificent, thunders down the tracks, buffeting the three; the couple and the watcher.

The couple kisses, a deep, heart-felt, gut-wrenching kiss, like two souls touching and two hearts joining, all fluttering hands and stroking fingers, and Ariadne wishes she could turn away because this is something sacred, this is love, this is togetherness (this is two halves becoming whole) and she almost can't bear it.

But she can't move, she's frozen as they kiss and the train races by and by the time its done, Cobb and Mal are touching each other's faces.

"We'll grow old together." Dom promises, and the dream is bright but Ariadne can see the shadows, can see the grass blackening, the tracks crumbling, the sky becoming pregnant with storms.

She sees, in Cobb and Mal, a sort of light that binds them, and she knows (oh she knows) that this is where it began, and her hands are shaking and she feels ashamed, because she's here and she's witnessing the birth of love and of the end, and it's private, it's a piece of Cobb that no one should ever have, and, of its own violation, the gun cracks and then the dream goes dark—!

This time, Ariadne woke slowly, her heart slow, her blood cool, her eyes opening gradually, in stages. She was crying, though, because what she saw was beautiful, was horrible, was too much and not enough and it was almost like a betrayal to Cobb, who was still unconscious and sprawled on the lawn chair, his skin pale, his soul fading.

Her bishop was heavy again and it fell to the left, clattering onto the floor, and this time it was Eames who looked up, who saw her awake and ambled over to her side.

"Bad dreaming, darling?" His jaunty tone was subdued (and it had been, for the last two weeks, no more joking, no more sarcastic insults, just quietness) and his face was older than it was before the Fischer job, but then, they all were older, were tired.

"I don't know." She gasped, wiping her eyes, clutching her bishop. "I don't know."

His hand was hesitant, not as comforting or as familiar as Arthur's was (a quick look around showed that the Point Man was also dreaming, hooked up to one of Yusuf's "borrowed" PASIV's) but the meaning was clear, and the Architect was grateful.

"Arthur told me you've been seeing Mal." The Brit cocked his head, studying. "Dreaming her."

"He said that everyone has been dreaming her."

"I've only dreamed her once, love." Eames's eyes were serious. "The first night, after we tried to get _him_"—Eames jerked his thumb at Cobb—"out."

Ariadne winced, remembering that attempt. They had hooked themselves up to the same PASIV as Cobb but they didn't go to limbo. They went into Arthur's mind instead, and the Point Man's projections, already riled up after the stress of the Fischer job, killed them all within minutes. They hadn't reached limbo and they hadn't tried again.

"You're the only one who's seen her what, three, four times now."

"So?" She was defensive now, protective of her dreams, of the things she'd seen, of jumping and of holding a gun beside the train tracks.

"It's not healthy, darling." Eames patted her arm. "You want to save him. You want him back."

Ariadne turned away, her eyes fierce and bright. "Don't you?"

"Of course, love. But you're going to end up like him, you know. Mal is not real. She's dead, and there's nothing you can do to fix what she did to him." There was an almost resigned look in the Forger's eye, and she recognized it, had seen it in Arthur.

"You've given up." She said slowly, standing, lurching away from him. "You've given up."

Eames made as if to move after her. "Darling—"

"Do _not _call me that." She was angry, was hurt and bewildered. "You're just going to leave him alone, aren't you?"

"It's been two weeks, Ariadne." Eames was quieter than she's ever heard him. "He got out once, but he was healthy then. Mal destroyed him, sweetheart. She destroyed him and he's not going to come out of limbo."

"You've given up." Her voice was tired, was moving on and away. She looked him in the eye. "I'm sorry." And she turned away.

"You can't go after him!" Eames called, still standing by the lawn chair, his hands shoved deep into his pockets. "You'll get stuck yourself."

At the doorway she turned and looked at him, all her determination and her dreams (falling and shooting and watching love begin and end) in her eyes. "I won't." She said.

And she turned and walked away, her bishop heavy in her hands.

She closed her eyes and saw soaring buildings and trains, saw blue eyes and broken glass.

_(These aren't yours to meddle with!)_

_But they are. _She told the projection, she told herself, deep in her mind.

She left Eames and Arthur and Cobb and stood alone in her workroom, her decision heavy in the air.

Eames watched her go, sorrow and acceptance and moving on in his gaze.

Arthur slept fitfully, dreaming of staircases and airplanes.

And in limbo, Cobb looked curiously at the sky and realized that the world was shaking.

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**Review! Again, if you have any questions just ask!**

**~WSS**


	3. iii: extropy

**Thank you so much for the wonderful reviews! I love that you guys love this, and your support means everything!**

**Disclaimer: I do not own Inception. It belongs to Cris Nolan, of whom I am insanely jealous. I don't own the mosiac lizard, either. I have a mini, but the origianal is Gaudi's. **

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Extropy: Creating order from chaos, the opposite of entropy.

_iii: extropy_

This time, the dream is her own. She's standing in a room, looking out a window at a sky that is bluer than blue and thick, puffy clouds that have old stone bridges bursting out of them. Below the sky, her city looks like something out of a Dr. Suess book (except not nearly as cartoon-y and colorful), with houses that twist and wave and loop, with streets that bend and bend in on themselves and projections that follow those strange loops uncaringly. If she had to say what she modeled her city on, she'd have to say the works of Gaudi (she loves that mosaic lizard to _pieces_), but a lot of it is her own creation, her own passion put into buildings.

For the past few months, ever since she's learned about dreaming, she's come back here, night after night (when she's not having impossible dream-memories about falling and trains and pain and love) she comes here and fills each room in each building with something more fantastic than the last. One of the rooms holds a jungle in it, a jungle where the trees grow from the ceiling and the flowers smell like cinnamon and coffee and the animals come up to her and lick her face and hands. Another room, her personal favorite, is a grass hill with a sky at perpetual, stunning sunset, the sun a glowing half-circle of deep orange and pink and purple, the faint stars trailing behind it. There's a room that's just the ocean, where waves slosh and pound against the walls, swirling and foaming.

And then there's this room.

This is, or rather was, one of her empty rooms. She hadn't got to it yet—it was in the corner of the top floor of this particular building, one of the last rooms. It was bland and square and completely unremarkable, a blank canvas, except now there's a staircase, one of those great spiraling ones from the Victorian era, all red velvet and polished white marble and burnished gold and smooth oak.

And she most definitely did _not_ put it there.

It's beautiful, she'll give it (great, now she's complementing random, inanimate staircases) that, but it's not her style. She likes spontaneity, randomness, _fun_ in her architecture. She likes lizards made out of mosaics and bridges in the sky, not Victorian staircases, and she _doesn't know who put it there._

Eames is not a Victorian man. If he created anything it'd probably be a casino, something dimly lit and smoky, with quiet laughter and knowing smirks and the rattle of poker chips and dice and ice cubes in empty martini glasses.

Yusuf can't create, as far as she knows, and he'd probably have something high-tech, like a custom lab, instead of a staircase. A lab half in shadow, with dreaming men on cots and the heady smell of somnacin in the air, with amber vials of questionable liquids and powerful, rich men on the payroll.

And Arthur is most definitely Victorian, but Ariadne's never taken him here (she hasn't taken _anyone_ here, and if he's been here she'll kill him) and it's not like Arthur to intrude anyway. Besides, he likes Penrose staircases too much to make a normal one.

So the staircase sat in _her _dream and she had no idea who put it there and why, and it was most thoroughly Not Good.

(_I've lost it. Is her first thought, because who else would put it there but her, and she can't remember it, so…_)

It _is_ a nice staircase, though, and she can't help but run her fingers up the railing and climb the first few steps. The wood is warm, as if it's been sitting in the sun for hours, but the marble is cool and the velvet soft, the gold sparkling and winking.

She gets all the way to the top and finds suddenly that the ceiling is gone, that the staircase keeps on going, and the she's not nearly as startled as she should be (she finds that happens a lot—she's just too damn curious to be scared).

She climbs and climbs, hands on the warm wood—

(_It's steady, she observes. There's nothing supporting the staircase at all but it's not waving or wobbling in the gentle wind_)

—and feet firmly on the velvet-covered steps, and she can see her dream world sprawled below her, the buildings that look like dragon backs or waves or fairytales. (She does have a mosiac lizard, but it's huge and alive and it wanders her streets as it pleases, occacisionally crushing a projection that may or may not look like Mary Watkins from third grade.) She can see the river, a lazy, clear thing that winds itself (impossibly) over and under and every which way to accommodate the dream-city. The staircase is taking her into her blueblue sky and her fat white clouds and she follows (that damn curiousity again, really, it's going to get her killed) and it leads all the way to one of her bridges, a crumbling stone thing that seems to change from a sort of gray to a reddish-brown, depending on the light.

Now a little nervous (because really, a Victorian staircase _that she didn't make _leading up into a hazy cloud and an ancient bridge _in the sky_. Nope, not suspicious at all.) Ariadne steps off and looks around, surrounded by the puffy white softness of a cloud and the warmth of her sun, because there's really no way in hell that she's making her clouds _cold_, reality be damned.

She walks down the bridge, casting nervous glances around every now and then, but Mal doesn't spring from the haze to shove her off or anything, so she relaxes, lets the tension go away, choosing to ignore what happened the last time she let her guard down, because she's ninety-five percent sure that Cobb and Mal have no memories or traumas five thousand feet in the air, on an old bridge, surrounded on all sides by cloud.

Of course, she's been wrong before, and the Cobbs are just (were just) downright unusual.

But she reaches the edge of the bridge and no one and nothing pops out at her, and she grins as she looks down at her world, noticing for the first time that her whole city, from the sky, forms the shape of a flower.

"It's called extropy." Says an all-too-familiar voice, and Ariadne freezes. "Creating order from chaos. Dreamscapes can be so crazy that the subconscious automatically puts them in some sort of order so it doesn't get confused."

Dom Cobb ambles from the hazy cloud and comes to stand at the edge of the bridge, a slight smile on his face. "Though I don't think I've ever seen the brain organizing the dreamscape into a flower before."

Ariadne watches him warily.

"What're you doing here?" She asks, her fingers curling into fists, her heartbeat picking up speed.

He tilts his head at her, his blue eyes curious. "I don't know." He says, not seeming at all perturbed by the fact that he's in her dream and she's freaking out. "It's nice, though. I like the buildings—very Gaudi, but more fun."

"You're a projection." She says, firmly, trying to convince herself.

Cobb tilts his head and crinkles his eyes at her.

"Did you put the staircase in that room?" Suspicion and wariness hardens her voice.

(_Not possible, not possible, he's a projection, he can't be real._)

He nods, looking faintly pleased with himself. "I've always had a soft spot for Victorian staircases." He confides, looking around. "I used to put them in every dream I created."

(_SO not possible, I'm losing it—_)

"Are you a projection?" Uncertainty this time; he has to be, because his mind is lost to limbo and she's not sharing a PASIV with him, so there's no way they are sharing a dream because it just isn't possible.

(But then, neither is a bridge in the sky and a staircase five thousand feet high)

"Am I?" He says, ambivalent.

She watches him, half-expecting him to morph into Mal or something, and he watches her back, calm and collected, wearing the expression her wore when he told her to go, to get out, that he was coming after her.

This doesn't make sense. He's got to be a projection, an image, a shadow, because their minds aren't touching in any way, but at the same time he built the staircases and projections can't build, they're just projections.

Arthur would say that her subconscious built the staircase and her projection of Cobb claimed it because she blames herself for him and guilt always shows in dreams (a fancy way of saying she's gone crazy), but this Cobb has to be more than a projection because his eyes are too bright and his face is not what she remembers.

Somewhere in the last two weeks he's changed, gained a weariness in his shoulders and a downcast to his eyes, and he never had that before, and projections can't age.

She licks her lips and something (some indefinable, strange, hot and heavy and _true _thing) falls into place. "Do you remember?" The question falls from her mouth of her own accord, completely free of her own will, but it feels right so she lets it go.

"Remember what?"

"Limbo."

He tilts his head and studies her, something naked and open and honest in his eyes. "You jumped." He says. "You took Fischer and jumped. And I…" But he trails off, confusion entering his face, though he shuts it down quickly enough.

"You stayed." She tells him, gently, studying his face.

"Did I?" Vague frustration, now—he's angry with himself. "I can't—"

"It's like a half-remembered dream, isn't it?" She says, coming closer to him against her own will, her heart hammering in her ears. "Do you know how you got here?" (Stupid thing to ask a projection—they're always hanging around in the subconscious, but the look on his face says he understands, so he's not a projection, then, but what is he?)

But the confusion clears and he looks down at her with a sort of relief etched into the lines around his eyes.

(_When did he get those?_)

"You." He says simply.

"Me?" Now it's her turn to be confused and she manages to draw away a little, to shy away from his confusion and the pain that she can see in his shoulders, in his chest.

"You brought me here." He says, as if it's the most obvious thing in the world and he's a little annoyed that she can't figure it out by herself. (Quite the teacher, this one.)

"I did?" Her brows draw together and she stares up at him, her darker eyes meeting his bright ones.

"You told me to come." He says, and she flashes back, sees the house in the skyscraper, the lightning flickering across the sky, the wind howling. She sees the crumbling city and the relentless ocean, and Cobb on the floor next to Mal, holding her hand. He tells her to go, and she tells him to follow.

Ariadne stepped closer again, this time only inches from him, peering up into his face, her hands shaking and her heart thundering.

"You haven't, yet." She says slowly, choosing her words carefully, brushing aside the wrongness of it (because this goes against all she was taught about dreaming because this man is not a projection, is he?). "You haven't come."

He shrugs, almost sheepish, but at the same time impossibly sad and exhausted. "I don't know if I can." His voice has taken on the strange quality of someone standing at the end of a tunnel, his voice distorting as if it's bouncing and echoing all around.

The dream starts to blur, to shake and shiver and fade. Her time's almost up, and Cobb is watching her, that sadness, that agony, in his blueblue eyes. (In them she sees Mal jump, sees the train thunder by, feels legs and heart buckle, feels love solidify, then get crushed to oblivion.)

"You can." She tells him, but he doesn't seem to hear her. "You have to, you're dying!" She throws out a hand, a desperate gesture, pleading, and he looks at her hand like a starving man looks at food and she sees his fingers twitch but it's too late, the dream is collapsing.

"I'm sorry." He's saying, and the bridge is rumbling, is cracking, and he swiftly steps to the side as a great crack rips through the air, and the bridge is breaking and suddenly there's no ground to stand on, there's only empty air and she's falling and staring into eyes so sad she can't breathe—

Once again, she woke violently, kicking out and flailing her limbs, still caught in that feeling of dropping, her heart too fast in her ears.

The IV didn't hurt as she ripped it from her skin, ignoring the droplets of blood that go with it, and she leaped up and lurched to the other side of the room, sagging against her table for support. Her hands scattered plans and blueprints and sent them drifting to the floor but she didn't care, she was just trying to breathe.

_Too much. _She thought. _Too much. _And it was—it was a thousand things crammed into ten minutes of dream, into one look between two people. It was pain and fear and sorrow and failure and love and architecture and breaking and mending all at once. It was the feeling of falling and watching a train go by, it was climbing a staircase and falling off a bridge, and it was a hand raised and a hand left shaking, grasping at empty air.

The table was hard and solid and real and her bishop fell as it always did, calming her, bringing her heart back down to normal, steadying the shake in her hands.

This time, there was no one around to offer her hollow advice, to try and rationalize away her dreams. She never was a rational person, though. She was too wild, too creative. She put bridges in the sky because they made her happy, because she liked them, not because they had a purpose.

And she wanted to save Cobb because he was family, in a way. He was an approving word, a protective stance, a soft voice in the throes of a nightmare. He was stability, though he himself was tipping and collapsing and falling all over inside himself, and he was the undisputed leader, the steady hand that led them on.

(He was something more—?)

But Arthur and Eames, they were at their breaking point, their limit. They had known Cobb for years longer than she had but they were ready to give up because they had seen others slip into limbo, and apparently, it was too hard to get out.

She had seen them standing over him, talking in low, anxious voices, had seen the way Eames couldn't look at Cobb's still face and the way Arthur ran a hand over his face. Their own self-preservation was screaming _get away before he infects you too!_ and they were listening, choosing rationality over their screwed-up family relationship.

She didn't blame them for giving up. It would be easier. It would be so much easier to just let him go, to take out the PASIV and leave him there, his body starving, his mind lost, until he died.

Some would consider it a mercy, even.

But—

Ariadne couldn't. She didn't know how to let this man go, because she was seeing him, was dreaming his memories, was seeing him in her own dreams, and that had to mean something.

It was as if, in limbo (shared, raw subconscious, her brain supplied) that she had taken a bit of him with her when she fell from him, from Mal and the growing puddle of projection-blood on the floor. She had taken a piece of him, or he had given it to her, and now that piece was rattling around in her head, prodding her forward.

And she couldn't let him go. That little bit of him, those memories, they ate at her. They occupied her thoughts and they lived in her dreams. They hurt like fucking hell, but they were there, and they offered the answer to her question, to Arthur and Eames' questions.

They could bring him back.

She knew this as surely as she knew her name, as surely as she knew how to create soaring buildings from nothing at all (order from chaos, Cobb said).

In her dreams, she had seen him breaking. She had stood on a bridge with him, a bridge that led from nothing to nowhere, and had seen the pain in his eyes, the shame and the guilt and the love that ripped him to pieces.

She had seen, too, weeks (an eternity) ago his own dreams, how he held Mal in a cage of memories and guilt, how she hurt him and he her, how they were trapped in endless pain that carried the screams of falling and the echoes of a racing train.

She had seen him hold on to Mal, had seen him cling to her shade, had seen him hold on so tightly she feared that he'd never let go. He had stayed in limbo. Some part of him chose dream over reality, chose to stay and abandon all of them.

But she had seen his fingers move towards hers. She had reached out to him and he had tried to reach back. It had been in his eyes, in the shaking of his hands.

He was broken but he was trying to mend, trying to move on and let go and wake up.

("I can't, I'm so sorry.")

And all the pieces fell into place. Ariadne slipped out of her workroom, scanned the warehouse quickly. No one was there, because it was nighttime—they were all out there, drinking or gambling or picking fights because they were lost, as lost as the man on the chaise. They too felt guilty, felt sorrow, and in their business they didn't know how to handle it. When they lost someone they moved on, they didn't linger around his body and half-hope that he'd wake up.

Ariadne forgave them. She always would, because it wasn't their fault, really.

(If they tried to tell her one more time that Cobb was a lost cause, though, she'd shoot them.)

She knelt by Cobb, took his cool hand into hers. His face was impassive, his heartbeat slow and sluggish. He didn't react, didn't jerk and start gulping air. She understood.

("I can't.")

And he couldn't. Parts of him were too far gone, too lost. She had only seen two of his memories, two of the floors he had put in his dreams, and she knew that two wasn't enough to make him take her hand. Two was nothing. Two was scratching the surface.

But she knew that there'd be more. (With Dom, there always was—more hidden, more under the surface, more passion and kindness and anger than she'd ever encountered.)

She would dream again and again and cry again and again but she would dream him, would follow him into limbo and drag him out by his throat, if she had to, because fuck he was part of her now (they all were, really, even Saito and Fischer and Yusuf) and she was not going to let him just fade away.

"I know you can't do this by yourself," she whispered in his ear. "I know you're scared, and you hurt, and you miss her."

No response.

"But I'm going to help you." It had come to her, on the bridge, falling and falling and seeing his fingers twitch. (An idea is the most powerful parasite in the world.) And it was insider her now, like he was, and she was not letting go.

"Do you hear me? You aren't alone." She was fierce, was determined, was all shining strength and determination.

(She saw him again, standing on the window ledge, collapsing, and holding Mal as the train blew by. She heard him on the bridge, felt his pain and his love all at once.)

And, around her considerably smaller hand, his fingers twitched.

* * *

**Some notes: Gaudi architecture is the shit. If you are ever in Barcelona, check out his buildings. And in Guell Park, you will find the mosaic lizard, which is the most awesome thing ever. I love him, and I have a tiny one named David Villa. I have actually had a dream where he was huge and he crushed this girl who was horrible to me way back in primary school. It was awesome. Google it anf fall in love!**

**For some reason, I like the idea of Ariadne putting bridges in the sky, simply because she can. She's not practical at all- she just loves creation. Also, they're a recurring theme in all my Inception work, it seems. :D**

**Thanks for reading, and review, please!**

**~WSS**


	4. iv: lost

**Thank you so much for reviewing, everyone! I'm really glad I have your support! Also, I apologize if any of my dream-science is off. I am trying, but still, it's such a fuzzy sbject. **

**A big thanks to all the peeps on inception_film, over at lj. You rock!**

**Disclaim: I am Christopher Nolan. Because, you know, he's eighteen, female, and has a slight Canadian accent, e****h?**

* * *

Lost: The state of not knowing where a person, place, or thing is located: being confused, abandoned.

_iv: lost_

She feels the sun on her face and opens her eyes. Sunlight, too bright, sharp and jagged like knives, stabs her eyes, and she hisses, turning her face away. All around her there is the light, refracted and reflected across a thousand surfaces.

Screwing her eyes half-shut, Ariadne breathes and tastes the sea, salt and wind and far-off somethings—she can hear it rumble, and there's sand beneath her toes.

White sand and flashing water and brilliant, brilliant sun, all around. The glare is harsh and unforgiving and the sand stings, hot on her bare feet.

She's standing on a shoreline, and in the distance she can see a city sparkling and see the smoke from an old train, billowing against the bright bright sky.

And she can hear childish laughter—high-pitched and joyful, a little girl and a little boy, shrieking and laughing as they play by the sea.

She sees the buildings, the impossible structures, and her heart goes cold. She's in limbo.

But—

_Not_, because she can see that her edges are softer, more real, less vivid than the dreamscape that Dom and Mal created for themselves. She's here, but not, a visitor (a tourist) and that thought is enough to soothe some of her worry.

This is another memory (another "floor" in Cobb's elevator) and she's safe, she's not a part of this and so limbo can't hold her, can't keep her.

The sun softens, just a little, and she can open her eyes without them watering, and she looks around, taking in the too-bright colors and the too-perfect sights of a dream. The water is as it was when she did enter limbo—it's clear and frothy and blue, endlessly whoosing and rushing and sloshing. There are some cliffs, rugged, brown, with tiny bits of green lichen and some cawing seagulls perched on the little ledges. The sun is sliding towards the sea, the sky glowing like fire after it, the white-capped waves turned red-orange by the light.

Two children—James and Phillipa—are building sandcastles, giggling as one by one their little towers are claimed by the sea. And Mal watches them, perfect, regal, a gentle smile on her face, sand on her hands and in her hair.

James says something, his voice too young for Ariadne to understand, but Mal understands and she laughs.

And then several feet away, his feet in the ocean, Cobb is standing by himself. He too is covered in sand, but there's no happiness on his face, only a shadow (grief, fear, homesickness) and he watches his wife and his projection-children with a slight frown.

(_He looks like a statue. She thinks. He's not even moving.) _

And he's not—he is perfectly still, barely breathing, his hands curled loosely into fists, his face carved from stone as the sea rushes and gurgles at his feet.

(_He's worried._)

"Come and play, Daddy!" The girl, Phillipa, calls, lifting her face (Ariadne can't see it—it's blurred, fuzzy) and laughing.

Dom offers her a distracted, forced grin. "In a minute, baby."

"What's the matter, Dom?" Mal rises smoothly to her feet, all grace and easy happiness, and she cradles his face in her hands. "You look sad."

He looks at her, and Ariadne can see that he _knows_ what's going on, that he's in limbo and his wife thinks it's reality and that if they don't get out they'll die.

"I'm fine." His words are hollow and Ariadne knows it, and Mal knows it, but she smiles anyway.

"Come out of the water." She coxes. "Come play with the children."

He watches her, his face flat, his eyes shuttered off. "Mal—" He says, and it's as gentle as he can make it but it's harsh, too, it's pleading, it's anger and love and desperation tangled together. The waves suck at his feet, swirling around him, the water foaming and blue. He takes a step back.

Something flickers in Mal's face, something dark (something vicious) and she smiles a smile that's mostly teeth and a promise. "Dom, come on." She repeats, firm.

This time he flat-out glares at her, his blue eyes ice and fire and steel, and takes another step back. The sea slops at his knees, now, waves slamming into him. "Mal." He doesn't waver, doesn't back down (mentally, anyway, because he _is _backing away, tiny step by tiny step, deeper into the ocean.)

Mal's face is dark, and the sky goes gray with it, the too-bright sunlight flickering out and blocked by deep, billowing clouds, and James and Phillipa start to cry softly.

Ariadne watches, fascinated and repulsed, because Mal is getting closer and Cobb is moving further away (the water laps at his thighs and breaks around his stomach) and there's a tension between them that's reflected in the sky.

"You're scaring the children." Mal says, softly, and now she's in the water too, up to her ankles.

James and Phillipa wail louder, on cue.

"They're not real, Mal." Cobb's equally soft, and his tone has pleading in it, has reason and reality while hers is loose and wild and hard.

"They're our children." The sky blackens, like a bruise.

"No, Mal." Cobb is firm, is tired and desperate (he can feel himself decaying, here, Ariadne knows it) and he spreads his hands pleadingly. "They're not real. None of this is real. This is limbo, Mal. We're _dreaming._"

"No." She steps closer and he steps back, the water at his stomach, the waves sloshing over his shoulders. "No, this is _real_, Dom. These are our children, this is our home!"

"Look, Mal!" And he lunges forward, grabbing her shoulders. "_Look_, can't you see it?"

And Ariadne sees it—the dream ripples, distorts, and Dom and Mal are standing before her, the ocean swirling around them, and they're old. Their hair is white and their hands are knobby, their skin tough and leathery and wrinkled. Mal's eyes are wide and her face is crinkled, her shoulders stooped. Cobb's eyes are misty, fogged over—he's not blind but he's close. His hands shake slightly and his fingers tremble.

They're eighty-something years old, and James and Philipa are still young, still babies.

Ariadne is seeing the world as Cobb sees it, crumbling, fading, the sea claiming tower after tower, everything covered with a foggy film, a fade—he's old and they've been here too long—but then the image fades and they're young again, smooth, bright-eyed, and their world is perfect.

(_Mal can't see it, can she?)_

_We did grow old together. _Dom had said. _You just don't remember. _

Mal pulls herself free of her husband's grasp, her eyes flashing and lightning flickering in the sky. James and Phillipa have gone oddly silent, watching their parents with weird focus.

(_Mal can't focus on them, so they stop being real_.)

"You need to think, Dom." She says, all glittering eyes and bared teeth. "This is real. You need to accept it." And she spins in the water, stalks to her silent projection-children. "Come." She says. "We're leaving."

"But what about Daddy?" Phillipa asks, in a small voice, and Mal softens and looks at her husband.

"He'll come when he's ready, darling." She says, and scoops up James and leaves Cobb there. He watches her go, the water lapping at his feet, seeing the world through his foggy eyes while Mal looks through rose-colored glass, and the look on his face is heartbroken (and heartbreaking) and Ariadne wants to go to him, to pull him out and away and leave Mal and her anger, her attempts at perfection, her flaws and her fractures behind.

But she can't.

For what seems like hours he stands there, looking after Mal, his face sad and his eyes dark, and the ocean hums around him.

"I wonder," he says, gazing at the rolling waters behind him, after the lightning dies down and the clouds start to slip away. "What would happen if I drowned?"

(_You'd wake up._)

Cobb looks behind him, at the endless ocean (at the way out) and he bites his lip—he's on the razor's edge, she can tell, balanced between two choices, waiting for the wind to push him one way or the other.

Left or right—the way out or Mal?

And Ariadne knows what he chooses. She knows that he goes to Mal, plants the idea, and then she kills herself and cripples him and then it's just a downward spiral into insanity (limbo) and there's nothing anyone can do, even though she's _here_ and she wants to stop him, to drag him out into the ocean and drown him because it would be easier that way, in the long run.

But she can't move, can't go to him, and he's standing in the water, the dark clouds fading, an idea (a parasite) birthing in his eyes. He stands in the water and Ariadne sees the end come to the light, and then she runs.

The runs far and fast and away, because she knows what happens next and she can't watch it, can't see it, because she's seen and lived the ending, felt the pavement swallow her body, grind her bones to dust. She's seen Dom Cobb crumple because his legs and his heart can't stand under the weight of Mal, she's seen the blur of a world rushing by too quickly and closing up over her head.

She can't see it begin, can't watch him plant the idea and the watch it fester, grow, the strongest of parasites, and eventually kill them all.

So she runs, harder and faster than she could ever run in reality, and by the end of it she's in a field, all swaying grass and rusted train tracks, and she's shaking. The sea is still beside her, gleaming, the sun slipping ever lower, towards the water. Her chest is tight as she replays the scene, over and over again in her mind, sees Cobb in the water and Mal on the shore, a great, invisible line drawn between them and loss spilling from their hands into their world.

And they're both lost, aren't they—one can't tell the dream from the reality and the other is too in love to do anything but break them more. They're misguided, their hopeless, they're spinning and spinning in their broken circles (like a top) and they're killing each other, bit by bit, tattered piece of dream by tattered piece of dream.

And even by herself, in a field with train tracks watching the ocean eat the sun, Ariadne can't escape them. They're magnets and she's the hapless bit of metal, drawn towards them even as every cell in her body is screaming at her to run.

And she doesn't really want to leave. She wants to help, wants to _fix_ what's broken and drag Cobb from his foggy-eyed nightmares, but she can't because she's just Ariadne the architect and this isn't even her world.

And she's still seeing them, Cobb and Mal, and she's far away but they are imprinted on her eyelids. She can't escape.

Mal's in her house in the tower, singing to James and Phillipa, seemingly unaware that everything and nothing is about to change. They are tomatoes on the table and there's a sunset out the window, brilliant and far brighter that it could ever be up home.

Cobb is in a little room staring at a bright, little doll house, and his fingers (sometimes withered, sometimes strong) fumble with the latch, and he drags the dollhouse open, and there aren't any rooms, only a safe.

She knows what's in the safe—Mal's top, her totem (the thing she once knew, but chose to forget), and it's on its side, and Dom's shaking fingers spin it, and at once there's a change, she tastes it, it's in the air, the sky. The top spins and spins and doesn't even wobble, and Cobb heaves something that's a sigh and a prayer and a sob.

(_Your world is not real_.)

The top spins and spins and up in her tower, Mal stops, clutches at her heart, confusion flickering across her face.

(_It is a half-remembered dream, isn't it?_)

Cobb stands in the dust of an old house, watching the top spin, his youth falling away every second, his eyes fading, his fingers shaking.

And Ariadne, in her field, watches the top spin inside her eyelids, and, out of the corner of her eye, she sees the sun again (the clouds have faded—the dream is breaking), and it's setting, it's blood red, and it paints the sky a sticky crimson, and she sees Cobb, eighty-something, watching the top spin and spin. She sees him go to Mal and she sees Mal collapse in his arms.

(_We're dreaming, aren't we?_)

James and Phillipa fade without a sound and their parents walk down the street, ancient and cracked with it, leaning on another, and Mal is crying.

Then they're in Ariadne's field by the city and the sea, and Mal's crying great heaving sobs that tear from her soul and shatter onto the ground, and Cobb murmurs soothing things in her ears.

Ariadne watches them, insubstantial, a wraith in the world that never should have been, and Dom and Mal lay on the tracks, and then they start to vibrate.

"You are waiting for a train." Dom says.

It rumbles, shakes the dream to its foundations, and the ocean swells, angry, and lashes out at the huge towers.

_You are waiting for a train. _

And then the roar of steel on steel is deafening, and Mal screams something to her husband—

"You'll be together!" (That promise, that chain that wraps itself around Cobb's throat and squeezes and squeezes)

And the train bears down, the tracks leaping free of the dream-earth, and Mal vanishes under the wheels and Cobb watches her go until he to is swallowed, and Ariadne sees two bursts of light (souls? Minds?) swirl up and over the train, shooting into the sky.

The train roars on, the dream collapsing around it, the light overwhelming, the wind tugging and pulling at the watcher.

As the dream collapses and echoes and the wind bears Ariadne away, she sees the train plunge into the ocean and the sun, the sun, bloody and brilliant, vanish into the waters, shooting out one last blast of glistening, sticky light—

It was a voice that brought Ariadne up. A hand on her shoulder, gently shaking her, and she blinked her eyes open and gazed foggily up at Arthur.

"Ariadne." He said again, and his voice, it was pleading. "Ariadne, you need to stop this."

She blinked off the haze of dreaming and managed to aim a half-hearted glare at the suited man. "No." She knew what he wanted. He wanted her to stop, to give up and move on.

"Why?" And Arthur's face was confused, sort of, his eyes bright and his head tilted just a bit to the side. "Ariadne, you're killing yourself."

He had a mirror in his hand and he showed her her face, and she looked away. She was as pale as Cobb, her eyes faded, deep purple shadows making her look like a dead thing. She hadn't really eaten in a while and her hair was lank.

But she wasn't important.

"I don't care." She said, turning away from him. "You don't understand."

His hand was on her shoulder again, insistent. He wasn't letting her go, letting her brush him off and send him away. "You've been avoiding us for a week." He said. "You spend all day holed up in your workshop, you don't eat, you don't sleep. You're going to kill yourself, and _it needs to stop."_

"Who are you to tell me that I need to stop?" She snapped, angry and hurt and drawing away, still seeing the top spin and the sun vanish into the sea. "You don't understand, Arthur!"

"You can't let go." He said, and his eyes were soft. "You think that if you let Cobb go you'll lose him forever, you won't be able to look yourself in the eye in the mirror. You think it's your fault."

Ariadne looked at him, and something inside her cried out. "It _is_ my fault." She said. "I left him there, he told me to go, and I _knew_ he couldn't do it on his own."

Arthur gingerly sat down beside her. "With Dom," (she started—she had never heard Arthut call Cobb by his first name) "you have to let him to whatever he thinks he needs to do. He's almost suicidally stubborn. Only Mal could talk him out of something, and she's gone."

"I should have tried harder."

"And dragged him out all by yourself? He's twice your size, Ariadne."

"I should have done something!"

"He had to stay, don't you understand? He _needed_ to stay, felt that it was his responsibility to get Saito. He wasn't going to leave without him, Ariadne, and then on the way back he got lost and now—"

"Don't say it." She said softly. "Don't tell me that I need to stop."

Arthur opened his mouth but she kept going. "I should have stayed to help him, to make sure he didn't get lost. I didn't, and now he can't get out."

"Are you sure he even wants to?"

"Yes!" She stood up violently, sending the PASIV to the floor. She spun to face Arthur. "I've got a little bit of him, Arthur, and it won't go away! He's _showing_ me things, showing all these little pieces of himself, and I can't close my eyes without seeing them! Last night he was in _my_ dream—he came into my thoughts."

Arthur's brow furrowed. "He must have been a projection, Ariadne. Minds can't touch without the PASIV and I know you weren't connected to him."

"He built something. He built a staircase, Arthur. In my dream. He built in _my dream._ He's not a projection—he's himself, and he's just—"

"Lost inside you head?" Arthur's voice was far too gentle. "You've got the pieces of the puzzle and Cobb is guiding you in your dreams?"

"Don't look at me like that." She hissed. "Don't look at me like I'm crazy."

He spread his hands appealingly. "What do you want me to think, Ariadne? You can't have him in your head—minds don't work that way."

"Why not?" She demanded. "We can share dreams, right?"

"That's—"

"Limbo is raw, open, _shared_ subconscious." Ariadne plowed on, desperate to get the words out of her throat (and the pictures out of her eyes) before they killed her. "It's minds touching in the most base way—baser than sex, even. In limbo, you create with a thought and it's just there, there's no logistics or dream-logic involved. In limbo you feel _everything _whoever you're with is feeling, just by touching them or looking into their eyes. I was in limbo with Cobb, Arthur. I saw him when Mal was there, when she tried to make him stay. And he was in my dream, and he tried, I saw him, he tried to come out, to wake up, but he can't by himself, don't you understand? I _have_ him, or at least some of him, and he's trying to get me to help him."

Her chest was heaving and her hands were shaking, her bishop too heavy in her pocket. Arthur was looking at her, his dark eyes serious and severe.

"Are you sure?" He said.

"What?"

"Are you sure that you're actually seeing Cobb, not a projection of him?"

"Yes."

"And that you're dreaming his memoires?"

"Yes."

Arthur stared deeply into her eyes, trying to gauge her words. Then—

"Alright." He stood up, shook himself, straightened his vest.

"Where are you going?" Ariadne was confused and so so very tired, watching Arthur, the top spinning behind her eyes.

"To start." He very gently laid a hand on her shoulder, his face soft and looser than she had ever seen it.

Her eyes watered. "You're going to help me."

He looked her in the eye. "We are a family." He said. "I've never turned my back on the idiot over there" (Ariadne assumed he was referring to Cobb) "before, and I'm not going to start now."

Gratitude flooded her exhausted system, and in that moment she could have kissed Arthur.

Almost as if he was reading her mind, he kissed forehead, very, very softly, and backed up, a sort of sadness in his impassive face.

"Don't." He said quietly, offering her a lopsided, quick smile. "We both know it wouldn't work."

She hugged him anyway, half-crushing his chest. "Thank you." She said, like a prayer. "Thank you thank you."

"Yeah, well." Arthur carefully pried her hands away from his back and straightened his clothes. "Like I said. We're a family, sort of."

And for the first time in days, she giggled. And they _were_ a family—a very fucked-up, criminal, bizarre family, a family made of fractured dreams and broken promises and puzzle pieces that don't fit together quite right. She's found brothers in Eames and Arthur and a cousin in Yusuf, and even a crazy, wacked-out uncle in Saito (who visited the other day, with a ridiculous amount of money and three new PASIVs) and in Cobb, something that was as confusing and as complicated as herself and himself and limbo, and she found that she couldn't help but smile.

She shakily lurched over to him and settled down by his side, tangling her fingers into his still ones.

"Did you hear?" She asked him. "Arthur's going to help now." And sure enough the Point Man was rustling around, dragging out papers and plans and a rather sleek laptop that Eames had acquired somewhere.

"We'll get you out." She whispered. "I promise."

In limbo, Dom Cobb titled his head up and watched the sea swallow the sun, noticing, with a bit of confusion, that it looked like a spot of blood, staining the sky sticky crimson.

* * *

**Review, please!**

**Thanks!**

**~WSS**


	5. v: interlude

**Hi, everyone! I'm sorry it's been a little while- college eats my life. **

**Warnings: Excessive swearing, because it's Arthur (Darling). **

**Disclaimer: I am not Chris Nolan. If I was, then perhaps I'd have a little more time to write. And sleep. And work with JGL. **

* * *

Interlude: A literary device in which a break from the story is taken and another point of view or piecxe of knowledge is introduced.

_v: interlude_

Arthur was worried.

To be honest, he was worried a lot, recently. There had been the Fischer job, the training of a new Architect, the fear of falling into limbo, Cobb _actually_ falling into limbo, and then the subsequent fear involved with Cobb staying in limbo for three fucking weeks. (twenty-one days, five hundred and four hours, or thirty thousand, two hundred and forty minutes, or one million, eight hundred and fourteen thousand, four hundred and one-two-three-four seconds)

Frankly, Arthur was a little tired of worrying.

No, scratch that—he was just plain _tired. _He was only twenty-seven (or something like that—he had forgotten his birth date a long time ago) and he'd seen enough and done enough and experienced enough to last a man three lifetimes. (Which Cobb was now living, stuck in limbo like he was.)

And he worried incessantly, these days, and it was killing him.

He worried about Yusuf, who had taken to wandering the streets at night, all wide-eyed and innocent, practically begging _Mug me, please_. Arthur knew the Chemist could take care of himself, but still, a group of thugs could take him.

He worried about Eames, who was drinking more and spending more and more time away from the team, his eyes hooded, playing with his totem endlessly. The British man was slipping away, was cultivating a mask of indifference with the intention of wearing it as he walked right out the door. Arthur didn't know if he could lose Eames, not now, when all his old friends where either dead (Mal) or dying (Dom).

He worried about Cobb, sick and dying and lost inside his own mind, fighting the past and his guilt and pain as it ate him alive. The man was strong and stubborn to a fault, but still, one man could only take so much.

And he worried about Ariadne, who flitted in and out of his field of vision, busy with something.

Arthur watched Ariadne out of the corner of his eye and worked on keeping his face smooth. That came naturally, of course, but still. The Parisian was perceptive, tuned in to the tiniest twitch in his face, in _anyone's_ face, really, and it demanded all of Arthur's concentration to stay unreadable. It was rather endearing yet irritating at the same time.

Except over the last few days (seven days, to be exact, one hundred and sixty eight hours, or ten thousand and eighty minutes, or six hundred thousand and eight hundred and one-two-three seconds) , Ariadne had been anything but endearing or irritating.

Quite frankly, she was downright scaring the Point Man.

And it took a lot to scare Arthur.

He was young but he has seen the darkest bits of men's hearts—since he was the Point Man, after all, and he's seen everything—and he didn't scare easily. He could count on one hand the times he's been scared—genuinely, scared-shitless scared— in the past ten years; he was scared in Fischer's mind, when limbo loomed above his head and warlike projections stalked at his back. He was scared once, many years ago, when he was cornered in Vegas by mobsters and a strange (possibly homosexual—Arthur still wasn't too clear on that) British man appeared out of nowhere and saved his life. And he was scared on the plane, watching Cobb's face as Saito broke free of limbo and Dom never woke up.

But things like death and blood and gore, they didn't scare him. He has walked in nightmares (lived one too, once upon a time), has died a thousand times and now even a gun in his face didn't make him cringe, shy away. (In dreams, this was a blessing. In reality, not so much.)

But Ariadne, tiny, sweet, curious Ariadne, she scared him. She was focused, driven, all of her creativity narrowed into one deadly beam that kept her up late at night and drove her to restless half-dream memories during the day. (She was like Batman, only smaller and less likely to pull explosive shit out of random orifices.)

She ate little and slept less, her skin growing pale and her eyes darkening.

She spent more and more time hooked up to the PASIV, her blood full of somnacin, and she was tiny already and wasting away.

Arthur had seen it before, and the result was the pale, dying man on the chaise, his mind lost and his heartbeat sluggish under Arthur's fingers. He had seen Dom Cobb suffer through the same thing, the obsession, the constant dreaming, the shadows under the eyes and the misery in the shoulders. It had killed him, really, had brought him to the edge and now it kept him locked inside his own head, drifting, dying.

Ariadne was heading the same way, and it terrified Arthur to his core.

He wasn't sure why she was driving herself so hard—she wasn't like Cobb, who had gone half-mad with loss and grief and guilt. She hadn't really _lost _anybody, not even Cobb, because she'd known him for a few months compared to Arthur's years. And yet she tried so hard, so so very hard that it hurt to watch, and Arthur leaped in because watching her die like Cobb would have been too much.

He still didn't know what to think of her claims that Cobb was talking to her in dreams, sharing his memories. He had been with Cobb for eight years and never once had the man willingly revealed a memory—he never talked about his childhood, where he went to school, his first crush, anything. Arthur was okay with this. He knew that some things were better left alone, in the dark, locked away in an iron box and never spoken of again. He understood that childhoods could suck, that parents and schoolmates and first crushes could be horribly cruel, and that some wounds didn't need reopening. He was alright with Cobb's reluctance to share. He himself had his own armor, his own layers of protection that he fought tooth and nail to keep in place.

Even when Mal died, when Cobb went into himself and never quite came out, Arthur didn't press. He didn't ask about their first date or their first fight, or what limbo was like. Then it had seemed wrong, almost, like a betrayal.

In hindsight, that had been incredibly stupid. Cobb had just lost his wife, the one person in the world he opened up to, had poured a bit of himself into. With that gone he had lost that _something_, that spark, that creativity that made him an Architect and a father and a good friend.

Cobb had fallen into limbo after Mal, and this time there was no miracle, no salvation, and Arthur blamed himself, because he let it grow out of control, let Cobb keep dreaming even though Mal was there (because he thought that she made Cobb _happy_) and Mal was dangerous (she shot him in the knee, which had fucking _hurt_) and Mal was killing him, job by job.

And then on the plane he had waited, white-faced, hands curled into claws around the armrests, watching his best friend and praying for his eyes to open.

They didn't, and now, almost three weeks later (twenty-one days, five hundred and four hours), Ariadne was killing herself and Eames was even more erratic than usual and Arthur could feel his mask slipping with each passing _tick _of his watch. (One, two, three, four)

It had to stop. (Tick, tick)

So he wasn't one hundred percent sure that Cobb was still fighting, under limbo. He didn't know if somehow part of Cobb got into Ariadne and was asking for help. He didn't know if the man wanted to be saved.

But damn it, Arthur was going to try and save him anyway. He'd never turned his back on his teammates before, his _friends_ before, and he wasn't about to start now.

So he worked.

All around him lay various articles and research and data, most of them from the military database (it wasn't as secure as they thought it was). These documents were every scrap of everything known about limbo—what is was, how time worked there, who had gone in and who had come out.

All in all it wasn't much but it was a start, it was work, and it was the only thing Arthur knew how to do in a situation like this, so he did it.

He learned that a total of fourty-seven people had fallen into limbo. Of those people, eight had come out (seventeen point oh two percent) . Three had died soon after (Mal fell in this list, which was thirty-seven point five percent of those who got out), two had been committed to mental institutions( twenty five percent), one had given up dreaming all together (twelve point five percent), and two, Dom Cobb and young Brazilian woman (again, twenty five percent), had been able to move on after the experience and continue working. And Cobb was in again, and no one had ever done that before and it scared Arthur because he was already mentally preparing to add him to the list of the lost, making it forty-eight—

_Don't even calculate that, Arthur. _

He learned that time in limbo wasn't the same as normal dream-time—that is, it didn't increase by multiples of eight and twelve as the dreamer went down levels. From the reports of the eight, an hour of real time could equal years or minutes in limbo—it all seemed to depend on the dreamer. That was a relief, because Cobb had been sleeping for three weeks now, and Arthur was worried that if Ariadne went into limbo she'd find a pile of bones or a man so old he was little more than papery flesh and brittle bone and ancient, dusty memories.

He worked and he watched Ariadne, who was drawing something, and Eames, who fiddled with his poker chip, and Yusuf, who swirled a bottle of chemicals half-heartedly, and Cobb, who slept, still as death and just as pale.

As he worked, reviewing the notes, drawing lines between the words, he heard them, all of them except the sleeping man, get up and leave.

Eames left first, off in search of a bottle and maybe a bar fight. Yusuf soon followed, anxious to leave the heavy, aching atmosphere of the warehouse. And Ariadne quietly shut the door to her workroom and Arthur _knew_ that she had just plunged the needle into her skin and was slipping into dreams again.

Arthur waited five minutes and twenty-seven seconds (three hundred and twenty seven seconds total) just to be sure, and then he slipped through the workroom door and peered down at Ariadne.

She was sprawled on a lawn chair, the PASIV stuck into her pale arm, whirring softly. She was out, the drug fully in her blood, her face slack, the tension over the past three weeks gone. On her table, maps and plans and notes were spread haphazardly, in neat, cramped handwriting.

Arthur didn't read them.

Instead, he very calmly, very steadily walked over to the PASIV (five minutes—an hour in a level one dream, sixty minutes, thirty-six hundred seconds), pulled up a spare chair, sat down, and, without a second's hesitation, a single other thought (no thinking about how Ariadne was going to _kill_ him, very violently, with something horrendously sharp), plunged one of the needles into his arm.

He had a brief, slow moment of clarity, feeling the world blur and his blood slow and his body grow heavy with the somnacin, and then—

He slept.

Arthur opens his eyes and he's standing in a city with buildings that look like dragons and fairytales and there are bridges in the sky and there's a staircase leading up to the heavens.

This is no memory, the Point Man knows that instinctively. It's something beautiful and startling and creative (Ariadne) and there's no way that this is a memory because it's too _perfect. _There's no pain, no humanity, only stunning buildings and warm weather.

Arthur warily steps through the cobbled streets, his head turning, processing the world around him, watching the projections (_all the men are nicely dressed, he notes, and the women all wear scarves_) with the eyes of someone who is used to being shot at.

The projections, however, pay him no mind. Apparently, he's dressed just right and he's not trying to steal anything, so the subconscious is perfectly content to let him be.

He walks down the streets, looking for the familiar profile of Ariadne, half-wrapped up in the colors and the sounds and the smells—it's like a cross between Spain and France, with French smells and Spanish colors, the projections laughing and singing to each other.

_Singing. _

Arthur decides not to think about it, and continues on, pushing deeper into the dream-city with its dragons and its fairytales, with its river that bends and twists and its looping streets.

As he goes, the projections thin out. They seem to be hurrying away from _something_, casting nervous glances over their shoulders as they scurry.

Which is a good indicator of where Arthur needs to go.

He tracks the trail of fleeing projections to a large, open square—the river, silver, flows through it and a fountain shoots the sparkling water everywhere, creating a heavy, shimmering mist.

It's ethereal, like it belongs in a fairytale, with nymphs in the river and fierce dragons and wise wizards prowling in the mist.

Arthur hates fairytales.

In the center of this particular fairytale, though, is Ariadne, the swirling mist-fog-thing clinging to her body, wrapped around her shoulders like a very large, very cool scarf. (_Here is the humanity, he thinks, here is the pain and the emotion and the too-much of it all._)

She's so tiny that she is almost invisible, shrouded in the fog as she is, and it's almost equally hard to make out her companion. But Arthur is so familiar with that outline that he knows it on sight—Dom Cobb, his edges erased by the mist, half-shadow, half-dream, talking to Ariadne, his words too low to be heard.

Arthur circles them, watching, alert and wary, the fog swirling around his shoulders, straining to hear what is being said.

He wants to confirm that Cobb's not a projection, that he's actually Cobb, actually Dominick, not some murky shade conjured up by Ariadne (not another Mal).

From what he can see, his friend is still tall, still lean, still broad-shouldered and blue-eyed and not completely here. He's half-melted into the mist and it suits him, it does, and as he talks to Ariadne there's a _thing _on his face, a thing Arthur does not know how to define and it's a breaking thing, it's a heavy thing that's shot through with fractures and miniscule cracks and he feels it in his chest like fire, Arthur does.

It's the look Cobb wore when he dragged himself to Arthur after Mal jumped, after his world fell to fucking pieces, and they were in Buenos Aires and Cobb clung to Arthur like a child clings to a security blanket and then Arthur didn't know what to do.

He still doesn't know what to do, standing in the mist of a dream he's not supposed to be in, looking at two people who probably should have never met, should have never leaned on.

And it's fucking killing him.

He's twenty-seven and he's always known what he needs to do, always known when and where and how and this time he doesn't and it's horrible because this time it's his family that needs him, it's his fucked-up, falling apart family that's in desperate need of superglue and healing, and _he can't do a damn thing—_

Anguish, hot and ragged like a gunshot, blooms into the dream. (It's his and her's and Cobb's mashed together, toomuchtoomuch)

There's a rumbling in the mist-world, deep in the ground, vibrating, pulsing, crashing into Arthur's senses with the force of a speeding train (the dream is falling apart—strange, it's twenty-seven dream-minutes too early). His legs shake and his heart aches and there's something heavy in the back of his throat, like a sob that can't quite get out, can't quite burst free, and the mist moans around him, curling, and Ariadne reaches for Cobb, almost desperately, her face softhardpleading, and Cobb looks at her with all his sad passivity, and the rumbling grows louder.

"I can't." Arthur hears, clearer than daylight, than glass and mirrors.

"Please." That's Ariadne, that's the Architect, trying to hold something together that was always a little broken.

"I'm sorry."

Again there's that bullet-wound of agony, and the dream quakes.

The rumbling (the death of a dream) grows louder and Arthur can't stand, sagging to the stone ground as the mist swells, thickens, as the buildings crash and the water breaks free from its confines and Cobb stands stock still as water and stone and fog blow up around him.

Arthur can't see Ariadne—she's fallen out, but he can see something else—Los Angeles, swimming with heat, the sky hazy. An old man with faded blue eyes tilts his head up curiously, and it's Cobb and he's got to be eighty years old—

More images, faster now, all at once, too much and too many and there's still that sob-breath caught in Arthur's throat—

Mal and a beach, the sky flashing—

A train and a field, love, long grass—

James and Phillipa—

Mal, cradling a knife—

A city window, a shattered hotel, a single shoe falling downdowndown—

Cobb crumbling, howling against the world—

Arthur can't fucking _breathe_—!

He woke on his feet, rolling reflexively away from the chair, the PASIV ripping from his arm, blood spraying, his eyes wide and his heart churning. (Approximately three and a half beats per second, two hundred and ten a minute)

Breath was too short, rapid, shallow, harsh and panicked.

Arthur's eyes swam, his vision blurred, images (_memories) _flickering against his lids so fast that he couldn't keep up with them.

There was a soft moan to his right; Ariadne, still slowly waking, her hands moving sluggishly. Her eyes flickered under the lids, the shadows under her eyes even more prominent before. She was frustrated—her teeth were gritted, her hands fisting, anger and defeat spasming across her face.

She would be angry, would be disappointed and bitter, and Arthur was _there_, was close by (too close) and she'd lash out, probably, because she had been doing so for a week now.

Arthur bolted.

He couldn't look at her, not now (or ever, probably, because he couldn't stop seeing her reaching out, hope and desperation and _love_ written on her face) and he ran because his heart and his breath were too fast and too rough. So he ran.

He ran out of the warehouse, into the street—it was dark, poorly lit. The alley stank like vomit and sweat and garbage and Arthur doubled over, trying not to lose his dinner as the images overloaded his brain.

_Totem! _He thought, half-panicked, (heartbeats one two three four—faster now, too fast. Risk of heart attack dramatically increased with every beat) and he scrambled for it.

The die was heavy on one side and smooth, the pits familiar, and he rolled it and it was a six, as always, and he breathed, forcing down the memories and the shaking and the toofastheart. His hands shook. He clenched them and waited for them to stop.

When they did, Arthur breathed and straightened up, steadying himself against a wall and staring at the tiny imperfections, the cracks and stains and flaws, as though they could offer him some great life truth.

They didn't.

Before he could change his mind, Arthur punched the wall.

The pain was satisfying, reality-confirming. It bloomed up his hand, from his fingers all the way to his elbow, hot and sharp like a knife. His knuckles were scraped, tiny little crimson drops dripping to the hard street.

He glared at the wall, the pain hot and heady in his hand, the reek of humanity in his nose.

The wall simply stood, almost mockingly (that's a sign of stress, Arthur Darling, giving a wall a personality), all it's flaws bared and unfixable, unless Arthur somehow spontaneously found several cans of paint, some cement, and a very large amount of drywall.

_You can't fix me. _The wall seemed to say. _Too broken for poor little insignificant you._

Arthur glared.

He knew it was true. He couldn't fix the wall—the team, he supposed, going with the metaphor his mind supplied—and it hurt, and it was a broken and breaking thing in his chest, a thread unraveling, peeling away to reveal the raggedness beneath.

They were all falling to pieces, every last damn one of them, and there was nothing he could do. In dreams he could distract the projections. He could fight and shoot and plan every little fucking detail to fucking _death _so that no one would get hurt, so that they could get out by kick and not have to deal with the heart-pounding, breath-stealing fear of being killed.

But here, in reality, he was just Arthur, just the Point Man, the researcher. He could still fight and shoot and distract but in reality the bad guys weren't so easily fooled. People got hurt in reality (broke, shattered, fell to the floor like glass), and Arthur couldn't stop it, and it killed him, it really did, because he fucking _loved_ each and every person on the team, even if he didn't show it.

He loved Yusuf for his quirkiness, for his surprisingly sharp wit and fondness of wrecking large vehicles.

He loved Ariadne and all her passion, all her creativity and her ability to dream so big and so well that it took his breath away every damn time. He had loved the feel of her, of her soft lips against his own, and he wished it could work between them even when he knew it couldn't. (He had seen her in her own dreams, wrapped in mist, reaching out to a man who could not reach back.)

He loved Cobb, his friend and teacher, who used to wander off and look at buildings or suddenly pull a staircase out of nowhere and put it in his dreams. He still loved the idiot like a brother despite all the worry and stress he was putting Arthur through. The Point Man remembered meeting him, years and years ago, when Mal was pregnant with Phillipa and the couple needed a Point to fill in. He remembered the look on Dom's face when Arthur held his newborn daughter, when he asked Arthur to be Phil's godfather.

And Eames, the annoying bastard, was Eames, was laughter and mocking and often quite vicious sparring, was a kick and a shove and an almost-fight. Arthur loved him too, sort of. Arthur needed Eames, needed his sarcasm, his British accent, his steady, firm hand as the projections closed in.

And they were all leaving him.

They were the cracks, the fractures in Arthur. He had been cold, before them. He had been a solitary, emotionless rock, closed off and shut down and misanthropic until Eames saved his life, all those years ago in Vegas, and brought him to Mal and Cobb and taught him dreaming.

Over the years they became _his_, and he was loyal to a fault and he couldn't leave them even though they were fucking killing him.

For a while, they had been a happy family. An argument-prone family, yes. A combative, crazy, violent, criminal family, but a _family_.

And then Mal and Dom pushed too far, went too deep and lost themselves, and Mal never pulled herself out and she dragged Cobb back in and the Fischer job blew them all to hell, it did.

And now they were all falling apart, were drinking or wandering or working themselves to death and out of self-preservation, they were separating themselves from each other. They felt their broken edges and they cut up their hands and they hissed and retreated, wounded animals, hurt and bewildered.

They were going to split up, going to leave each other.

And Arthur was not about to let that happen.

They needed each other—this he knew as surely as he knew his own name, as he knew the weight of his totem in his hand.

He straightened, pulling away from the wall.

This—this brokenness, this abandonment, this family split—it was going to fucking _end. _

Arthur was going to find Yusuf and Eames and fucking _tie them to their chairs _and then they were going to help Ariadne and then they were going to go get Cobb.

And then they were going to _kill_ the idiot, were going to show him that just because Mal was dead didn't mean that he could up and fucking leave them.

He adjusted his suit, his face settling into his mask, his steel and his fire.

His knuckles were bleeding, clenched white around his totem.

He walked out of the alley and into the night-lit streets of Los Angeles, searching for an Indian and a drunk Brit.

He was going to fucking fix this.

* * *

**A/N: Arthur's last name, Darling, is the invention of Tom Hardy's ad-lib skills and the wonderful author mithigril, whom I adore and respect immensely like woah. One of the best Arthur/Eames writers in the fandom, if you ask me. **

**Also, I apologize for the swearing. It is my personal headcanon that Arthur cusses up a storm underneath that mask of his. **


	6. vi: hope

**Hi guys! Er, I'm terribly sorry about the three month wait... You can all shoot me, now, if you are so inclined. I was kind of blindsided by life and then I found all the Inception communites on livejournal, and I ended up signing on for a Inception Big Bang fic (it's a monsterrrrrrrrr) and the inception_kink meme is like crack, so... yeah. **

**My apologies!**

**Dedicated to , who reminded me to update this today! You rock, darling!**

**Disclaimer: If I owned Inception, I would be the most awesome person ever. **

* * *

Hope: That ridiculously tenacious thing that makes us feel as if everything, no matter how bad, is going to turn out all right.

vi: hope

She opens her eyes and is surrounded by light.

Brilliant, shattering, piercing white light. It glows from everywhere and she almost thinks that she's dreaming about Cobb and Mal on the shore in limbo again. But there is no rush and crash of waves, no cawing of birds or laughing children.

There's the muted sound of traffic from somewhere, and the groan of wind against a building, and Ariadne blinks rapidly and a room starts to swim into view, the light softening, going golden and quiet.

She knows this room.

Wooden floors, granite countertops, light that slants golden from a window—this is Cobb's house, the home he made with Mal, and there's a knife and tomatoes on the counter and dozens of pictures lining the walls.

Ariadne has time to look at them all, to see Cobb and Mal, barely older than she is, dancing at their wedding, holding Phillipa, then James, and she sees James and Phillipa grow from babies to adults, sees graduation photos and gowns and dresses.

"Dad," someone says, and Ariadne turns, surprised, and sees two people standing in the kitchen. One is Dom, his hair the color of a clouded sky and his eyes tired and blue, and the other is a young woman, blonde, blue-eyed, maybe twenty or so.

Ariadne recognizes her from the pictures—Phillipa, all grown up, no longer a little girl laughing in her father's dreams.

Phillipa is angry. "Dad," she says again.

Cobb smiles, lopsided. "Phil."

"Get out," Phillipa says, coldly, and her shoulders are pulled back. She stands proudly, fiercely. She is angry, and her father is sad.

"Phil—" Cobb tries, spreading shaking hands pleadingly, appealingly. "Phil, please."

"No," says Phillipa, and Ariadne sees a bit of Mal flash in her eyes. "No, _Dad_. Get out. I don't want you here."

Dom winces. "Phil," he tries again. "You're my daughter."

"Am I?" Phil shouts, and Mal sparks in her gaze. "You _left _me, _Dad_. You fucking left! I was _three _and you disappeared."

"I know, Phil, I am so sorry, so sorry—"

"Save it," Phillipa hisses. "I don't want to fucking hear it, okay? James might forgive you, Grandpa might forgive you, hell, _Grand-mère _might forgive you, but I'm not going to."

Cobb drops his eyes and Ariadne aches for him, hurts for him, because this isn't a memory, this is a fear, this is a nightmare, a glimpse at a future that he very well might have to face one day.

"I didn't want to," he says, very quietly, and Phillipa laughs and it sounds like it causes her pain.

"You didn't want to?" She cries. "You didn't _want _to? Then why did you, huh? Why did you run? Is it because you really did kill Mom?"

"No," Dom snaps, and Ariadne sees the glimmer of old anger. "No, I did _not _kill Mal—I loved her, Phil, I really did. Your mom was sick, she was confused and hurt and—"

"You did something to her," Phillipa cuts in, her eyes glittering. "You and Mom, you did something and then she was never the same, right?"

Dom's face goes white and Ariadne watches.

"How did you—"

"Find out?" Phillipa's voice is scathing, is harsh and angry. "I asked Uncle Arthur. He said it was time that I knew. You made Mom sick, _Father. _You made her sick and then she died, and it's all your fault!"

"No," Dom says, and it sounds like the gasp of a dying man, short and ragged and pleading. Ariadne wants to go to him, wants to be with him, but she's rooted to the spot, can't move.

"Yes," Phillipa cries, and she takes a step towards him. "Yes, Dad, it's your fault. You killed her and then you left us!"

"I didn't mean—"

"But you _did_. You left and you never came back!"

_Came back, _echo the walls, _came back came back came back _until the dream rings it with, the floor and the pictures and the knife on the counter vibrate with it.

_You never came back. _

And then the dream changes, shifts. The sun dies, guttering like a candle. The tomatoes disappear, leaving only the knife. Pictures collapse from the wall, others ripple and change—Dom vanishes from all of them, leaving only his children, growing up without a father.

And Dom himself ripples, his hair going blonde and his age falling away, until he is thirty-something and bright-eyed and crushed again, and Phillipa stares at him and there are tears in her eyes.

"You're not real," she tells him, and he doesn't look her in the eye. "You're not real, Dad, you're gone. You're _dead._"

"Phillipa," Dom says, tiredly. "Phillipa, Phillipa, please."

"No." She's crying, tears rolling down her face. It starts to rain.

"No, Dad." Her hand twitches, moves, almost of its own accord. "I'm sorry," she tells him, and her fingers curl around the knife. "I'm so sorry, Dad."

"Phillipa, don't."

"Too late," she smiles, and with a cry she plunges the knife into her father's chest.

Ariadne shouts—she can't help it—and from the depths of the dream, she hears music.

_Non, je ne regrette rien_

"Phillipa," Dom says, and his hands are soaked red, his blue eyes wide. He falls to the floor and Phillipa sinks to her knees over him.

She's crying. "I'm so sorry," she murmurs, over and over and over. "So sorry, you're not real, you're a dream, I'm so sorry, Dad."

Ariadne is crying too, shaking a little, trembling.

It's raining, sheeting from the sky, and the dream is going dark, fading, and Ariadne is willing to go with it, lets it pull at her, take her away

_Non, je ne regrette rien, _Edith Piaf sings.

_No, I regret nothing_—

She is still dreaming. The ground is solid under her feet, made of stone, not wood. She hears voices and water and the sounds of everyday life, and reluctantly she opens her eyes, anticipating a new trauma, a new horror.

She's still shaking.

She's in her own dream this time. She recognizes the buildings, the design. Her projections mill comfortably and somewhere she here's the deep thundering footsteps of her lizard, stomping after his next meal.

She's standing in a square. She knows it instantly—it's one of the ones she created when she was angry or sad or hurt. The river flashes through it, sparkling, muted, and there's a large fountain in the middle that sprays silver mist that swirls in the air and turns it into shimmering fog.

It's chilly and she shivers, and the mist settles around her like a scarf.

"Nice place," Cobb comments, and he comes padding from the fog, his edges blurred and misted over. He offers Ariadne a smile.

She studies him. He looks like he did before, on the bridge, with his age on his shoulders and the slow, hesitant grace of an old man.

"Your daughter is something else," she tells him, because she doesn't know what else to say.

"Isn't she?" The smile Cobb gives her is almost fond, but its nervous too, tense, wound tight. "I always thought she'd grow up with her mother's passion."

"Passion?" Ariadne mutters. "Jesus."

Dom shrugs, and he seems half-faded into the mist, half-blurred, half-erased.

"We're trying to find you," she says.

"We?"

"Arthur and I."

Cobb actually almost grins this time. "You convinced Arthur?"

She nods. "He still loves you, you know."

"I know."

"He's trying to convince Eames to help, and Yusuf."

"Yusuf didn't know me that well in the first place," he says gently. "And Eames… Eames is a firm believer of 'cut and run.' He won't stay much longer."

"He's stayed for three weeks," Ariadne says defensively, because she's tired of everyone giving up on each other, she really fucking is.

Cobb shrugs again, cants his head. "Has it really only been three weeks?"

"Yes."

"Feels like centuries," he says, and looks off into the mist, at the projections that are leaving the square in droves, and one that's prowling, mostly hidden, just a shadow. "Maybe longer."

"You should come back with me," Ariadne tells him, and she reaches for his hand. "Come on, we can go, right now."

Cobb smiles at her, bitterly, sadly (resigned, he's _resigned_) and keeps his hands in his pockets.

"Come with me!" She says, and somewhere deep in the dream there's the white-hot of a gunshot and a cracking, a rumbling, deep and powerful and inescapable. The dream is collapsing.

"I can't," he says, and his hands stay in his pockets, this time, the mist swirling now, spinning, tugging at him, swallowing him.

The ground shakes under Ariadne and she's swaying, stumbling. "Please," she says.

"I'm sorry," Dom murmurs, and she's trying to stand on pitching ground. "You know where to find me," he says. "You know what you have to do."

And the mist swallows him and the ground heaves, and she's falling, and behind her she thinks she hears someone shout—

She woke alone. The PASIV hummed beside her steadily, and she lay back on the lawn chair and listened to her disturbingly even breathing.

Was she so used to pain now that it didn't hurt anymore? The thought caused her to chuckle, bitterly. She wouldn't mind if it was that way, actually, because there was an ache in her chest that she couldn't quite get rid of, no matter what she did or how she tried to find Cobb, to wake him, to drag him back.

_I can't, _he said, _but you know where to find me. _

Limbo—he was talking about limbo. Ariadne didn't want to go into limbo. She'd been once, and that had been enough. She'd seen it, felt it—eternity, stretching every direction, dragging on and on and never ever stopping.

She wondered how many lost souls were down there. One could go for literally centuries and never find anyone.

_So how am I going to find him? _She thought, and she stared up at the ceiling, at the stains and the cracks and the splotch that was shaped like Tiger Woods. _Where is he, in limbo?_

Arthur had done some research—he said, according to the few who had been in limbo and returned, that it wasn't structured like a dream. There was no labyrinth, no great maze to solve. Each person dreamed uninterrupted—their dreams didn't bump with others, didn't mix or mingle. Cobb and Mal had been down there fifty years and never saw another soul. Dreamspace was flexible there, was, for all intents and purposes, unlimited.

_But Cobb found Saito, _she argued with herself. _Dreamspace obviously overlaps _somehow_, otherwise he never would have found him. _

_But what's the connection, the shared bridge?_

She was on her feet before she was consciously aware of getting up, staggering over to her worktable, shaking the dream out of her legs.

Her cell phone was lying on it, turned off, unused in the past three weeks.

She turned it on.

Instantly, it began to buzz almost continuously—text messages, missed calls, emails flooded her phone by the dozen. She caught some of the messages as they flashed past;

_Ari where r u?_

_Helloooo?_

_Ari we're worried bout u. _

_Ari?_

_Hey, u there?_

_Where are you?_

_Prof. M says you got a work placement…. _

_R u coming back? It's been five weeks. _

She stared at them all, from her college friends, her roommate, her classmates. They missed her, they were worried about her.

She checked her missed calls too; twenty from her roommate, eighteen from her parents ten from her friends, seven others from classmates. Her emails were the same, all worried and anxious messages, questions.

_Are you coming home soon?_

The ache came back, persistent, heavy in her chest. She hadn't realized that she would be missed—meeting Cobb, dreaming that first time, all of it had swept her away from her comfortable life. She had left to go with him without even saying goodbye, without even thinking to.

Absent-mindedly, she opened a new message and started typing.

_I'll be home soon, _she said. _We're wrapping up the job here. I can't wait to see you all. _

She sent it to every contact in her address book.

Saito's number was preprogrammed into her phone—it was something ridiculously complicated and encoded—but she managed to get it from the mess of her contacts and she hit _call_.

And she waited.

And waited.

After a few minutes, there was a click and then someone started to speak rapid Japanese, firing off what sounded like accusatory questions.

"I need to talk to Mr. Saito," she said, loudly and clearly. The person on the other end increased their babbling. "I need Mr. Saito."

There was another sound, a sharp word, and a click. "Hello," a smooth voice said. "I am Hana. How may I help you today?"

"I need to talk to Mr. Saito," Ariadne said, relieved. "It's important."

"I'm sorry, Saito-san does not take calls without an appointment."

"Please, it's really urgent, my name is Ariadne, tell him, he'll let you know—"

"I do not know how you got access to this line," Hana cut in coldly. "This is Mr. Saito's private line. We do not accept business calls."

"It's about Fischer-Morrow," Ariadne blurted. "Inception."

Hana was silent. "Very well," she said, after a long pause. There was more clicking in the background and more rapid-fire Japanese, but this time Ariadne heard her own name and Fischer's. Hana was talking about her.

There was another sharp click, and then

"Ariadne?" Saito's voice came over the line, deep and reassuring and a little perplexed. "To what do I own this pleasure?"

"Jesus," she told him, slightly frantically. "Couldn't you make it a little easier to get a hold of you?"

"My apologies," he soothed. "Your numbers are being programmed as we speak. Any future calls will come through directly to me without interference."

"Yeah," she muttered, dragging a hand through her hair. "Listen, Saito, I need your help."

"Oh? If it is legal trouble I assure you that I can buy a jury of your peers quite easily, a judge as well—"

"No, no, it's not legal trouble." Ariadne huffed a laugh. "Wait, you can buy a jury?"

"Technically I can buy several," Saito said dismissively. "But you are not in legal trouble, and you told my assistant about inception. You are still in Los Angeles, which leads me to think that this discussion is about Mr. Cobb."

"It is," she confirmed. "Listen, Arthur and I, we think we can get him out."

"Of limbo?"

"Yes. We've been working—well he's been researching and I've been dreaming—and we think we can get him out. We just need to _find _him."

"Can you not go under with him?"

"We tried that. We ended up in Arthur's subconscious and we were ripped to shreds. We think we need to go into limbo separately, in our own dream, and look from there. We'll still be connected to Cobb, but we'll go through three or four levels."

"Ah," said Saito. "And you are worried that you will not be able to find him, in the vastness of limbo."

"Yeah. We've learned that dreamspace in limbo isn't shared—it's infinite, there's a separate space for each individual. How did Cobb find you? You both went under at separate times, and you were in your dreamspace and he was in the city he built with Mal."

"I do not know how Mr. Cobb found me," Saito said, slowly. Ariadne's heart sank. "But when he was brought to me, my projections had dragged him from the ocean."

"The ocean?"

"Yes. He had been drifting for days."

Ariadne couldn't stop the smile from breaking out on her face. "The ocean?" She repeated, and Saiton agreed again, slightly bemused.

"Thank you," she told him.

"Do not mention it," Saito said, and she could imagine him waving his hand magnanimously. "I would come myself, but I am currently entangled in business. Do call me when he wakes up, though."

"Of course," she said, and Saito ended the call.

"Arthur!" She shouted, and bounded out into the main workspace. Excitement surged in her blood. She could find him, could figure it out—the ocean was the bridge between dreamspaces, was the common ground. Each dreamspace was like an island, then, all one had to do was swim. "Arthur!"

There was no response, and Ariadne stopped, surprised. Arthur was usually hunched over one of the tables, clicking away on a laptop or reviewing file after file. He was gone, and so were Eames and Yusuf, though that was typical.

"Hello?" She called. No one answered.

"Damn," she muttered, looking around a little helplessly. The only person in the warehouse was Cobb, unconscious in his lawn chair. Resigned, she sat down beside him, threading her fingers through his considerably paler ones.

"We're going to find you," she told him cheerfully. "We've found out how. The ocean is the bridge, did you know that? You did, obviously, you found Saito. We're coming after you now, there's nothing you can do to stop us."

She imagined that he'd smile, if he was with her, maybe chuckle just a bit, in wry amusement.

"You can't stay down there forever," she said, and ran her free hand through his hair. "I'm going to bring you back."

She imagined that he said _I know_, with his hands in his pockets and his head tilted a little to the side. He'd squint at her, putting together something in his head.

"As soon as Arthur gets back," she murmured. "We're coming after you."

* * *

**~WSS**


End file.
